Rewriting “Little Red Riding Hood”: Victorian Fairy Tales and Mass-Visual Culture

Charles Perrault’s classical “Little Red Riding-Hood,” in which a young woman is commodified as a red riding-hood, makes explicit that the more the woman’s outer appearance is in keeping with the fashion standards of the day, the more she should be able to regulate her nature. This idea was even more emphasized in the Victorian period, which saw the advent of mass visual culture. Both Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s and Harriet Louisa Childe-Pemberton’s 1867 and 1882 revisions of Perrault’s tale foreground the link between the illusory nature of reality and modern femininity in order to challenge dominant (bourgeois) definitions of femininity as image.